Wake Me Up When It's All Over
by Maidenstear
Summary: Even as they watched him make the last attempt to obliterate the wall (or perhaps himself), he still screamed and bellowed, finally crumpling to the ground (the last one, he didn't fall with a battle and a scream, but a whimper and trembling, curling into the fetal position like he could hold the entire world at bay).


Aneko: Hello, all~! It's new fandom time. Yaaaay. *Confetti is thrown*

Disclaimer: Me? Own Shingeki no Kyojin? HAHA—no, really. I could _never_ create something so violent. Or depressing. I do not own it.

* * *

**Wake Me Up When It's All Over**

_I tried carrying the weight of the world,  
But I only have two hands_

_(AVICII)_

They told him that when the last of the titans fell, the body rocking the foundations of the earth before it became vapor, that for a moment no one breathed, watching him, cautiousness imbedded in them like the scars that crossed their flesh from the 3DMG.

And as he let out a shriek, like none they had ever heard him make before, they still did nothing. He wanted to know why that didn't make them draw new blades and get ready for the battle that had been settled like a virus in the back of everyone's minds since the day he had been adopted into the scouting legion. They told him that he hadn't shrieked out of blood thirst, but out of grief.

He didn't believe them at first. Didn't want to, even knowing the truth of it, that a tiny part of him really _was_ titan-blooded. And that part of him had just lost the last being that was like him.

They let him. Watched him keen and screech, dig fingers into ash-crusted earth.

They told him that after that, he had flung himself at the wall, slamming his head into the mortar over and over. And when his human body could no longer handle the constant hiss of steam and regeneration (his skull broke four times, his jaw fractured twice, and he dislocated his shoulders at least seven times), he used his fingers to tear away at the stone. Even though it barely made a dent, even though he scraped away skin, lost blood and the tips of his fingers between those small regenerations, he still carved at the stone, like he could pull it right out of the wall.

Even as they watched him make the last attempt to obliterate the wall (or perhaps himself), he still screamed and bellowed, finally crumpling to the ground (the last one, he didn't fall with a battle and a scream, but a whimper and trembling, curling into the fetal position like he could hold the entire world at bay).

And they told him that when they carved him out, titan flesh that smelled of rot sloughing from his body like a hideous cocoon, he still screamed. Lids shutting over bloodshot eyes and curling into himself once again, his voice quickly burned down to a hoarse, static breath. Hands descended on him to tug him out of his discarded skin, cradling him in blood-soaked arms, and still he screamed.

As they gently laid him in the last mostly-whole cart and started their journey back to the city, where all of humanity waited, he still screamed.

He never stopped.

Through the gates, down empty roads (victory tasted like the taut adrenaline of a normal day, because the reality had not yet sunk beneath their skin), back to base, where they laid him in a bed in a room without bars.

They told him they had fought hard for that. Everyone was divided. Some people really did view him as a hero (the ballads are still being written, the story still hushed whispers in the smoky bars), but some people just saw him as The Last Titan.

They tell him all this because he doesn't remember most of it, and he wasn't present for the rest.

They tell him because in seven days he has not left the bed. After eight days they no longer believe he can.

They tell him all this because he isn't getting better.

* * *

When he was little, his favorite word was "hero," and his favorite thing was the Scouting Legion, because _they_—the people who went out and took down the monsters_—_they were heroes.

* * *

They take turns coming to visit him, only he wishes they would all come at once, because sometimes he mixes up his live visitors with his dead ones.

It's between Marco and Corporal Levi that he sees Mikasa. He wants to ask her to stop wearing that _scarf_, because it's _red_, around her neck like blood welling, oozing, dripping, and he's forgotten again if she's alive or dead because the BLOOD—

But his tongue sticks in his mouth again, and she wouldn't have even agreed to take it off it he had asked. She acted like it was the only thing she had holding her together.

(Maybe it was).

He is still thinking of stars, and maybe the pain has made all the parts of his brain run together until he doesn't know which way is up anymore. Sometimes he thinks he wouldn't mind dying.

But perhaps he said this part aloud, because Mikasa's eyes have gone wide and she shakes (it is more of a small tremor, really. Something he barely sees, which she barely shows).

After that, he is almost never alone.

* * *

"It'll be great! You know, once we convince everyone else that you're great. You'll be a star!"

He wants to say that stars just burn themselves up and disappear, like they were never even there in the first place. He doesn't say anything at all.

* * *

Armin only comes in sometimes, when he's halfway between sleeping and waking, and that scares him because it makes nightmares and reality slam together in a violent mirage.

Armin tells him they've been busy trying to help. He tries to tell Armin Thank You and _Are You Alive?_

His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth.

* * *

They try three times to shift him after the war. When they try the last time and nothing happens, blood still running down his hand, they tell him that maybe he just can't any more. Then they tell him that this could be the key to no one thinking that he's The Last Titan anymore.

But all he can think of is burnt-out stars and the fact that _hero_ is no longer his favorite word.

* * *

Corporal Levi visits the most—Erwin has no time, and the guards won't let low ranking soldiers through very often. Each visit is cut precisely into thin ten minute intervals—long enough for the Corporal to brief him on the current plan for his future, or lack thereof.

But the Corporal never asks anything of him, so he lets the words sail by as he tries to remember whether or not Jean is supposed to be standing near the door, or if that's wrong.

The only one he knows for certain isn't supposed to be there is his mother, and she comes almost as often as the Corporal. He knows she shouldn't be there, but does nothing to stop her as she touches her cold hand to his forehead to check the fever, then settles into a chair and sighs out stories of a life that could have been. He only manages to sink back to the bottom of reality when someone who is not his mother calls his name. It's always a different person but it doesn't really matter because in each one he sees sad eyes.

* * *

He didn't tell them the first reason he screamed out in the field after the final battle, and he doesn't tell them the second either. Doesn't tell them that beating the last Titan had meant winning, but that absolutely nothing had changed, and the moment he felled the Titan and realized it, he didn't know what to do. All the rage he had consumed as fuel in defeating the Titans had been used up, leaving behind nothing but sadness.

After all, the dead stay dead, and not even _heroes_ could change that.

There are far too many dead, but he remembers each one, like constellations in the sky, each a collection of burning stars.

* * *

"At least the last shift regenerated all of you. You can be thankful for that," they tell him. This was before the pain had started. He thinks of a commander with one arm and doesn't agree.

Instead he gets muscle spasms, an ache behind his eyes so bad he almost can't see, and his teeth clenched so had his jaw trembles as he tries to wait out the pain.

It is his body, coming to terms with every broken bone and limb that was never supposed to grow back. Humans, after all, are not meant to regain what was lost, the way lizards re-grow their tails. They blaze out and are not relit again.

"It's okay to scream if it hurts—we understand," they say, trying to soothe him. "It's strange, though. Your bones aren't broken or twisted at all."

Of course he knows this. After more regenerations than he can count (can these fingers, muscles, limbs, bones even be considered really his anymore?), this is a pain that bones know nothing of, twisting through muscles and burrowing between veins.

But if this is the punishment for the re-growth of his _head_ while others didn't even survive an infection from a leg wound, let it come. He does not make a sound.

* * *

"This is pathetic," Annie says. Her arms are crossed and her voice is pinched, like saying this is backing her into a corner. "What happened to that kid who was so desperate back in training?"

He hurls a pillow at her, but turns away so that he can't see whether it hits her or if it goes through her. He doesn't want to know.

* * *

The next time he is visited by Corporal Levi, he gathers, between expletives and insults to some of the higher-ups involving creative scatological humor he never would have thought of, that they are taking him somewhere. He doesn't know where, though, and he thinks that they might have told him this before, but he had been so saturated in pain that he didn't hear.

While he still thinks and tries to remember if Petra or Historia had said anything in their last visits Corporal Levi has gotten up to leave, but he stops and looks back, and his eyes are black mourning, like he's looking at the bodies of all the soldiers he was unable to bring back home. It is such a rare expression for the Corporal that Humanity's Last Hope stops wondering and wandering and _listens_ to his superior, knowing that this is important.

The Corporal takes his time to say it, though. He pauses to frown and shake his head, like an older brother who has discovered that his younger brother has done something completely moronic.

But when he looks him in the eye again, his gaze is still left behind in a blood-drenched landscape years away. "Don't do this, Eren." His name is water to a man dying of thirst. Not Brat, not Humanity's Last Hope, not The Last Titan. Eren. "To yourself or the others. Come back. The dead will stay dead. You have to let them go."

From the expression on the older man's face, he realizes that the Corporal understands what it's like to be visited by the dead. Maybe he also knows how it feels to be a burnt out star.

Maybe he also hates the word hero, because maybe there were times when he couldn't live up to it either.

* * *

They take him to the wall, which puzzles him, because they've already won, they shouldn't need him for anything anymore. In fact, he wonders why the wall still stands—surely they should be tearing it down one brick at a time, the last symbol of a time of fear.

It is while he still thinks this that they reach the spot. They do not even need to draw his attention to it. His gaze is drawn on its own as soon as it comes into view. Through hazy, grained shards of a memory, he looks at the damage, the giant grooves and gashes made at his hands and remembers. It has not rained, so some of his blood still stains the ground, and he remembers the feel of it if not the pain.

The blood he remembers but the word he doesn't, because it _is_ a word, mapped out in the scars he has left behind.

He may not remember the word, but the same part of him that clawed it onto a wall is slammed with its meaning now. He lifts a hand to his mouth and sinks his teeth in. No one bothers reaching for a weapon—in fact, no one even carries one. When he doesn't transform he doesn't know whether he wants to laugh or cry. Yes, they had tried to make him change before, but this is the first time _he_ had wanted to.

He looks at that word again, and it pushes past the pain that still scorches through his body. Then he wills himself out of the wheelchair that they have brought him in with legs they never thought he would use again. He sees the shock on their faces and then shocks them again when he opens his mouth. "There's somewhere I want to go."

* * *

It's the ocean.

It's more blue and more _motion_ than he thought it would be. Armin's book never really did it justice in all of its glory and he doesn't realize he's crying until he sees their concerned faces, but he can't stop, just like the screaming couldn't stop, but just like the screaming, he _just can't help it_.

This, he remembers, is what he had been fighting for. Not for revenge, not for humanity, but for a world. For a picture in a single book of a place he never thought he'd be, for a look across flattened landscape that goes for miles without walls, for the sound of birdsong and wind in the air and _nothing else_.

So when he stumbles in the sand and sees the panic on each of their faces, he smiles, because he knows they know. They hadn't told him that his body was fading from the inside, like a cooling, dying star. They didn't need to—he knew better than they did. It makes sense this way, really. He had been fighting a long time for the _will be_, and now that it's here, he is not needed for fighting.

As he closes his eyes for a little while (maybe a few minutes, maybe a lot) he thinks he hears Corporal Levi saying something like Humanity's Last Hope isn't allowed to just _give up_, and he smiles up at the Corporal, hoping that it conveys that it's not giving up, and he isn't just fading the way dead Titans dissolve to nothing. He just doesn't have to be Humanity's Last Hope, because humanity has found a new hope waiting where the wall ends, and he is just Eren again.

But Just Eren is tired, and the time limit of a body burdened with the defects of regeneration is almost up.

His vision swims in front of his eyes, and there are too many people in front of him. He takes a breath and closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, less than half of the faces remain. It's a little more lonely this way, but he looks at the way Corporal Levi still stands in front of him, and takes one more step, because that's what moving forwards means.

* * *

"Ugh, this is going to be so _boring_," one person says as they plod up the museum steps.

He laughs at the complainer. "What, scared of a few monsters?"

"I'm not scared! I could totally have beaten these Titan freaks!"

"Yeah, if they were video game monsters," he says, rolling his eyes.

"_And_ you had unlimited lives!" Another person quips. They all laugh, then, and the unfortunate friend's face has gone pleasantly pink.

A recent archeological find had swept the nations by storm, cleaning up more mysteries from what historians had labeled the "Titan Age." Their history teacher, who was completely enamored with learning about the period, had told everyone to go to the exhibition based off of the new findings that had recently come to town.

Their small group trailed through the front doors and began skimming through the displays, gleaning just enough details to prove to the teacher that they had gone, and barely pass any possible pop quizzes.

He is between two vague and equally uninformative plaques when he glances up and sees it across the room. It's easily the largest piece in the museum, taking up half of the wall. He crosses the floor without the memory of doing so. His friends might be calling him, but he doesn't really care. He's too caught up in the piece of wall—for that is what he knows it to be—stretching to the edges of his vision. And he can read it, can read the message that the plaque insists is nothing more than marks from the war, can read the desperation, the sadness in the language of a far off time.

He lifts a hand to his chest, and it is half a salute, half an attempt to clutch at his heart, like he has to make sure it's really beating beneath his skin. The images in his head aren't memories, but more like a private conversation he is eavesdropping on.

"What the—dude, are you_ crying_?"

And he is, but he doesn't know if it's because of the horrors those soldiers faced, or because he knows that no one around him can see the faces as vividly as he can, the sleepless eyes, the lines on young faces, the bravery. He breathes deep, and rereads the word on the wall.

_LIVE._

He pushes his shoulders back and nods.

"Thank you."

* * *

Aneko: Awkward ending is awkward.

Maaaaaan this fiction evolved faster than Butterfree on season one of Pokemon. Like you don't even _know_ man. It was originally like half this size in my head.

To be completely honest with you, I'm not a big fan of this manga/anime, mostly because I feel like so many awesome characters die before I know how they're awesome, and that keeps me from connecting with the story. Except for Levi. The day Levi dies in Shingeki no Kyojin is the day I stop keeping up with it. For serious, yo. Long live Levi. In my head canon Levi lives forever.

Notes for confused people:

*It's not strictly linear when he's hallucinating in bed. Just go with it. Like a lazy river at an awesome water park.

*I wrote this with the idea that at least Levi is alive, but don't tell you who else is alive/dead, so unless Levi and Eren die during the series…my plot could (theoretically) happen! HA!

*My brain thinks without consulting me sometimes. If you find something confusing, odds are I will have no idea how to clarify it for you. Or I won't want to because I want to remain awesomely mysterious, like a non-sparkly, non-pop culture vampire.


End file.
